MattyDickPics Taibbi Doesn’t Like When Charlie Savage Takes Away His Russian Spy Toys

I want to talk about one paragraph that appears in this screed from Matty “Dick Pics” Taibbi, written after Matty declared the Durham classified annex is proof he’s been right for years, responding to Charlie Savage’s explainer on the import of the discovery that the emails — from which Russian spies purportedly wrote a report claiming Hillary was going to politicize Trump’s ties with Russia — were manufactured. The rest of the rant boils down to “NYT wah wah wah NYT NYT” and is of course riddled with errors.

But this short paragraph is a piece of work, even for MattyDickPics.

Matty dismisses the import that the emails behind the report that he and the right wing have chased for years were “assembled by Russian spies.” He claims this is just about a “pair” of emails, but that dodges what was really there:

• Two drafts of an email purportedly dated July 25, both incorporating a Russian idiom in an email presented as the original English
• An email between two Russian spooks, which Durham describes to be dated July 26, talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory about the Deep State
• Another email purportedly dated July 27 containing the imagined smoking gun that Clinton approved this alleged plan; the email was attached to an email between spooks that seems to reference their plan to gin up a conspiracy theory
• The report itself, the date of which Durham has always hidden and we still don’t know (but it is either dated July 27, incorporating that email purportedly dated July 27, or it precedes the date of the main piece of evidence supporting the claim in the report)

It’s enough, for Matty, that the emails were “likely pulled by Russians from other real American victims of hacking.” Nevermind that only one other email reflecting the language of the email has been found, and that other email was largely unrelated to Hillary Clinton and, oh, also pertained to Russian rat-fucking and language play. It’s enough for Matty that these Russian spies cut-and-pasted from something else they stole to justify treating the claims based on that purported email as “true.”

You see, Matty wants to separate those emails (admittedly Savage refers to them as a pair, just like Matty, but it matters that there are two drafts of the July 25 one) from the larger cache — the existence of emails in English using a Russian idiom dated around the same time as some Russian spies decided to gin up a conspiracy theory, this conspiracy theory, the one Matty has monetized for years.

To dismiss the fact that conspiracy theory he has monetized for years is based on a report based on manufactured emails incorporating a Russian idiom in English, Matty says it doesn’t matter, first, because there are numerous other American “victims,” scare quotes. The sheer breadth of Russian hacking stands in for accuracy for Matty, and he’s happy to dismiss the plight of the victims if he has to.

He also claims that the larger SVR collection “has been described in multiple other reports as real.” Matty is conflating — as other Russian propagandists have — “real” for “accurate.” Here’s what those other reports have said:

• 2018 DOJ IG Classified Annex: At best, the reports based on stolen emails (in this case the January and March 2016 allegations about Loretta Lynch pressuring the FBI), involve multiple levels of hearsay and invitation to exaggeration. But the FBI believed parts of the emails were “objectively false.”
• 2020 John Ratcliffe email: Ratcliffe’s initial disclosure of this report explains, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
• 2020 HPSCI Report: The right wing report incorporated a great number of SVR reports, without any discussion of whether the things they claimed about Hillary Clinton — such as that she has Type 2 diabetes — match known reality. More importantly, to sustain their claim that these are “real,” they ignore the part of one of the Lynch reports stating that Jim Comey would draw out the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, which is what actually happened, and so if true would mean Trump didn’t win without help. We know with certainty that the authors of that report cherry-picked what was available to serve their needs. (Indeed, we know they ignored the email between Russian spooks about ginning up a conspiracy theory.)

So, no, Matty. While other reports describe these documents as authentically obtained from SVR, those other reports either dodge the question, raise real questions about accuracy, or declare several “objectively false.”

Nothing in this performance from Matty — his utter disinterest in provenance, a disdain for “victims” of Russian aggression, and a conflation of “authentic” for “true” — is new.

It’s just a really condensed example of his grift, written in response to the exposure that his nine-year grift was always built on a deliberate conspiracy theory ginned up by Russian spies exploiting people just like him.